One Race, One BloodChikamu

There’s only one race, but over time we’ve elevated things like skin color, hair texture, language, and ethnicity to a level where they become the main criteria we use to judge entire groups of people. And then we take those classifications and assign them values that we use to include or exclude, to normalize or stereotype, to celebrate or denigrate. We use these things to determine who we hire, the boundaries of neighborhoods, who gets pulled over by police, the length of prison sentences, and on it goes.

This is wrong. This is sin. But sadly, we’ve let it creep into our churches as well. So, when I say the American church has color-coded Christianity, what I mean is that we’ve allowed our brokenness around race and class to define how we express our faith and how we value one another. We’ve put our own cultural preferences and perceptions in place of the radical, upside-down values of God’s kingdom. In Matthew 20:16, Jesus says “the last shall be first, and the first last,” but we’ve done everything we can to make sure we’re first.

Sometimes I think the American church needs a vision like the one God sent to Peter in Acts 10. Maybe we need God to tell us in no uncertain terms about our bigotry and our need to show the same grace to others that have been shown to us. We need for Him to challenge us about calling what he has created “common or unclean.” Then maybe we can say along with Peter, “I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation, the man who fears Him and does what is right is welcome to Him” (Acts 10:34–35).

I’m speaking very broadly, of course. And I include myself in the criticism. We as the American church need to take more ownership for our collective sin, our obsession with things that will not make an ounce of difference in heaven, and our failure (past and present) to stand up and speak up for the poor, for the stranger, for the ones who don’t look like us. We need to be awakened to the truth—God’s Truth.

America has seen at least three Great Awakenings over the course of our history. With each of them, there was a break from complacency and ritual ceremony. God used each of them to inspire movements aimed at healing the ills of society. They were marked by a deep sense of personal conviction and a commitment to a new standard of personal morality. The Second Great Awakening was used by God to stir the hearts of Christians toward the abolition of slavery. The experience of free whites and enslaved blacks worshiping together at these revivals caused many white Christians to begin to question the differences between their spiritual reality and their cultural practice. I’m praying for another Great Awakening where God shakes the Church in America and helps us to see the truth about race and how our misunderstandings have stained the vision.

Race is just one way that we’ve allowed ourselves to be divided, but it’s a big one. And in light of our nation’s checkered history with the subject, it’s clearly one that we need to do more corporate confession and lamenting about before we can move forward.